Steve is a Professor of Collaborative Computing, co-founder of the Mixed Reality Laboratory at the University of Nottingham, UK and Director of the EPSRC-funded 'Horizon: My Life in Data' Centre for Doctoral Training in the area of personal data and digital identity. He has previously held a prestigious EPSRC Dream Fellowship (2011-2014) and was the first Visiting Professor at the BBC in 2012 and a Visiting Researcher at Microsoft Research in 2013.

Designer. Innovator. Boundary Breaker. Steve is no stranger to ground breaking UX design and methodologies. A multiple award winner - ACM CHI best paper awards (2005, 2009, 2011 and 2012); 2003 Prix Ars Electronica for Interactive Art; 2007 Nokia Mindtrek Award for Innovative Applications of Ubiquitous Computing and four BAFTA nominations - Steve is well-versed in the area of augmented and mixed reality, tangible and material computing, UX applications in culture and entertainment such as spectator interfaces, amusement parks, museums and many more. In its broadest sense, the nature of his research is motivated in projecting design of new technologies and new interaction techniques to support rich social interaction and merging art with technologies. The latter has seen him work with many artist groups to create interactive live performances including a series of works with Blast Theory dating from 1996 to the present day and further collaborations with Active Ingredient, Brendan Walker and others. Of late, he has focused on merging physical and digital artefacts through hybrid crafting. His publications are a testament that his work is extremely unbounded and highly creative, unusual, futuristic and breaking conventional boundaries. There is no wonder then that he was elected to the CHI Academy in 2013.

It is a great honour to have Steve as one of the keynote speakers for the upcoming i-USEr 2016 - it's time to unbound yourself from conventional HCI and we are providing you the opportunity to learn from the Master himself.

Follow Steve on his twitter and research blog

Title: Marrying Art, Craft and Technology - HCI's 'turn to the material' is driving a growth of interest in craft - how can we empower people to work with both physical and digital materials to make highly personal interactive artefacts that bring beauty and meaning to their lives?

I will draw on recent experiences of crafting interactive artefacts - including a handmade acoustic guitar called Carolan that can that recall stories from its past - to explore the nature and future of crafting in the digital age. I will address questions such as: How might we gracefully interleave physical and digital interactions? How can digital augmentation enhance the provenance, utility, personal meaning and sharing of everyday things? And how do digital technologies fit with traditional craft practices? Answers will include new approaches to decorating everyday things with interactivity, the concept of 'accountable artefacts' that gather and tell stories as they are passed from owner to owner, and an exploration of the gifting as a new approach to sharing

Adrian David Cheok is Chair Professor of Pervasive Computing at City University London, and currently helms the Imagineering Institute of Iskandar Malaysia as Director. He has extensive experience in mixed reality, real-time systems, embedded computing, wearable computers, fuzzy systems and power electronics.

His work has been highly recognized. Some of his impressive accolades include the Hitachi Fellowship, Microsoft Research Award for Gaming and Graphics, SIP Distinguished Fellow Award, and first prize in the Milan International InventiON competition. He was also elected as World Economic Forum Young Global Leader, and as a Fellow of the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA), an organisation committed to finding innovative practical solutions to today's social challenges.

Part of his initiative in providing alternatives to solving today's social challenges has seen him involve in unconventional collaborations with Nike, National Oilwell Varco, Ministry of Defence, VF Corporation and many others. His research has also seen him produce boundary breaking inventions such as "Human Pacman", "Magic Land", "Metazoa Ludens and "Kissenger".

Therefore, it will be a great miss if you do not catch him in the upcoming i-USEr 2016. It is time to unbound yourself to extraordinary HCI applications by learning from the Master himself.

Follow Adrian at his twitter and research blog

Title: Everysense Everywhere Human Communication - This talk outlines new facilities that are arising in the hyper connected internet era within human media spaces.

This allows new embodied interaction between humans, species, and computation both socially and physically, with the aim of novel interactive communication and entertainment. Humans can develop new types of communication environments using all the senses, including touch, taste, and smell, which can increase support for multi-person multi-modal interaction and remote presence. In this talk, we present an alternative ubiquitous computing environment and space based on an integrated design of real and virtual worlds. We discuss some different research prototype systems for interactive communication, culture, and play.